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Historic Bag ‘O Chips (Ch. 2): Worms Love the Stuff!

by Nate Downey

Six or seven weeks ago our friend Jobyl gave us a fully compostable potato chip bag. Dutifully, I tossed it into the sink-side “fly proof” kitchen scraps container, which takes an almost daily trip to the compost pile out back. The bag was so brightly colored and so extremely loud when crinkled (or even touched), I felt a little guilty when it came time to dump the stuff. It just seemed like I was putting something very, very wrong in our sacred pile of soil food. Later, along with the coffee grounds, smushed fruit, soggy rice-crackers, and all manner of muck, the Sun Chips wrapper popped out and onto the pile. Quickly, I covered it up with nearby compost.

I pretty much forgot about the bag until the other day when it was time to plant my Fathers’ Day gifts: eight (8) green seedless grape-plants. While loading compost into the wheelbarrow, I found Jobyl’s old bag looking good as new, so brightly colored, in fact, that the bag seemed to jump out at me like alien fangs in the latest 3D movie. The interesting part, however, is that the bag was also clearly fostering an extended family of worms! And at no time during that particular compost-using exercise was there a time when I found more worms anywhere in my extensive travels through the pile.

What is it about junk food? What’s in it that both human culture and vermiculture crave so desperately? The answer, of course, is often corn refined to one of its sweetest and/or oiliest forms. I just wonder now, too, will my worms start fighting obesity after all of the compostable materials I’ll be feeding them in the future?

07/01/2010 | Compost | Edibles | (0) Comments